Why The Terrorists Were Men

People do, in fact. It’s no accident that one of the most-talked-about novels of the past year is titled How Should A Person Be? Things are changing, and traditional structures are being dismantled. It’s going to cause some anxiety. But can we really understand terrorism through the lens of changing sex roles, or as an act of “hyper-masculinity?” Is this different from viewing it, in a bigoted fashion, as an act of “hyper-Islamic-ness”? Or is just more socially permissible?

We know that men are, by far, the more violent of the sexes. The chemical most associated with masculine development — testosterone — causes violent reactions when administered, for medical reasons, to both men and women. It is not difficult, or even particularly uncomfortable to me, as a man, to entertain the idea that this impulse can grow distorted, or can be warped to the degree that it results in violence.

A lot of human essentials can become warped or distorted. Patriotism, ethnic identity, religious affiliation, sex — all of these things can swell grotesquely, and explode violently into the world. In our current society, which is characterized by diversity on these and many other levels, it is necessary for us to mentally separate warped versions of these things from the things themselves. We understand, for instance, that when a horrible act is carried out in the name of a country or a religion, it is not the country or religion that is at fault as a whole, but rather this warping process. Cancer, at root, is just a warped and destructive form of cell growth. It’s less than perceptive to discuss these things without making this crucial distinction.

Concerning male violence, another more prominent Salon columnist, Camille Paglia, once said that “there is no female Mozart because there is no female Jack the Ripper.” It’s a provocative, polemical statement, but it contains an intention toward fairness that Carmon’s article did not. Paglia saw that the male sex contained all of these outliers and extreme cases; her radical element was to wonder if some of them were good. A classicist by training and at heart, Paglia’s thoughts contain an idea of natural balance that was central to the Greco-Roman worldview, but which has fallen by the wayside in our more pragmatic era.

Defining things like terrorist bombings as “hyper-masculine” is not only unfair but not useful. One could even mount a spirited protest, and claim that while the bombings weren’t “masculine,” heroic actions such as the rescue of double amputee and iconic photo subject Jeff Bauman by cowboy-hatted peace activist Carlos Arredondo most definitely were. But that’s too easy. That’s just reversing things.

In truth, masculinity is such a central and formative human quality that it likely lies behind all sorts of behaviors, both positive and deeply destructive. In this sense, Irin Carmon was right to notice that it is an essential trait, and perhaps even more implacable in human affairs as a whole than things like religion or nationality or culture.

Unfortunately, her article did not take the form of a broad and rueful meditation on what makes us human, and why our history has taken the often-bloody forms that it has. Instead, it was a short piece that linked half of the world’s population, in an essential and unchangeable way, to a despicable act of violent terrorism.

Were it to have done a similar thing on almost any other basis, and religion is the elephant in this particular room, it would not have been published. It would have been seen as no different from the many right-wing, Muslim-baiting tweets that Salon so usefully gathered in the bombing’s immediate aftermath. It would have been seen as just another “worst reaction.”